The Elegant Variation

CRACE ARCHIVES TO AUSTIN

The archives of Jim Crace - author of TEV favorite Being Dead - have been acquired by The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

The archive contains all of Crace's manuscripts, not just of his novels but of stories, plays and essays. The collection also includes notes and outlines for works, reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work, recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence and a proposal for two novels, "The Finalist" and "Archipelago."

The juvenilia bit is especially interesting just now as we've been considering a garage purge and are agonizing over what to keep.  How many writers, we wonder, keep everything?  Are you hoarder or a streamliner?  Advice and perspectives welcome.

WHAT WE'RE READING

Two extraordinarily good reviews for you to spend some quality time with today:  First up, Daniel Mendelsohn takes on The Landmark Herodotus (which we have been dying to crack open) for the New Yorker:

A major theme of the Histories is the way in which time can effect surprising changes in the fortunes and reputations of empires, cities, and men; all the more appropriate, then, that Herodotus’ reputation has once again been riding very high. In the academy, his technique, once derided as haphazard, has earned newfound respect, while his popularity among ordinary readers will likely get a boost from the publication of perhaps the most densely annotated, richly illustrated, and user-friendly edition of his Histories ever to appear: “The Landmark Herodotus” (Pantheon; $45), edited by Robert B. Strassler and bristling with appendices, by a phalanx of experts, on everything from the design of Athenian warships to ancient units of liquid measure. (Readers interested in throwing a wine tasting à la grecque will be grateful to know that one amphora was equal to a hundred and forty-four kotyles.)

Elsewhere, now that some of the heat has burned away, Ruth Franklin takes a predictably thoughtful look at Beautiful Children, and comes away deeply impressed.

As a writer, Bock is still a little rough. His characters' dramatic monologues sometimes run away from them, and certain anachronisms in the plot (particularly its heavy emphasis on videotapes) betray the eleven years he reportedly spent on the book. But these are minor complaints about a hugely ambitious novel that succeeds in ways that other recent (and hugely hyped) novels of similar ambition have failed. Beautiful Children manages to feel completely of its moment while remaining calmly unaffected by literary trends. It makes only the faintest nod toward magical realism. It is free of typographical gimmicks and other antics of style. And it demonstrates a deep, almost classical understanding of the way the novel form ought to work--the patterning, the layers of meaning, the motif casually tossed into the beginning pages that is picked up again later with an altogether different spin--that so often is missing in even the most lauded contemporary novels.

WHO KNEW ... ?

... that Isabel Fonseca (Mrs. Martin Amis) created our favorite TLS feature, NB?

BOND MEETS MAIGRET

Librarian's Place alerts us to this wonderfully entertaining account of a conversation betwen Georges Simenon and Ian Fleming discussing the business of writing thrillers.

'My friends think my writing isn't literature and therefore deserves no sympathy at all,' Fleming said.

'Thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, but it is possible to write thrillers designed to be read as Literature. Practitioners in this vein have included such people as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and of course, Simenon. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these."

MONDAY MAILBAG: THE "BACK FROM A LONG TRIP" EDITION

* Five Chapters celebrates its 75th story with Kate Christensen's Voice Lessons.

* There goes the arrondissment: The Academie Francaise admits a pop songwriter.  Elsewhere, from the "Department of Fun as Only the French Can Have It", the fate of the semi-colon hangs in the balance.

* Amitava Kumar offers his own coverage of the recent Philip Roth shindig.  Elsewhere, Sam Tanenhaus reports on the Buckley and Mailer memorials.

* Bruce Bauman considers a new collection of 41 previously uncollected Leslie Fiedler essays:

Unfortunately, with the exception of a handful of essays, the pieces here do little to highlight the myth that was the thunderous Fiedler. Too many reiterate points Fiedler made with greater flair elsewhere -- especially in regard to the homoerotic undercurrent in many American novels. Too much time is spent on Fiedler's disdain for the New Yorker and its middlebrow taste, as well as his enmity toward the "New Critics" and the French theorists. He meticulously, um, deconstructs "The Grapes of Wrath" until it fits quietly in the middlebrow book bin. There's a funny piece on Twain's little-known pornographic skit "1601," and other pieces draw perceptive parallels and distinctions between William Faulkner's Temple Drake and J. D. Salinger's Franny Glass.

* The Telegraph considers the new iteration of Granta under editor Jason Cowley, and delivers a mixed but hopeful notice.  (Incidentally, the new Granta site goes live April 15 - an auspicious date, indeed.)

* Arturo Vivante, who wrote more than 70 short stories for the New Yorker, has died.

“His stories were very much of their time,” Roger Angell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, said on Thursday. “Short fiction was becoming shorter, coming down to the intentionally modest. He was thoughtful in his perceptions of human emotions.”

* Steve Wasserman uses the occasion of the publication of Fidel Castro's autobiography to wonder how history will judge the dictator.

* Time Out New York catches up with several of our favorite people - Maud Newton, Lauren Cerand, Kimberly Burns - who try to untangle the "unpredictable world of publishing."

* The New Republic hosts a debate/discussion about comics' golden age.

* Nigel Beale interviews David Solway on "What makes a poem great?"

* In his latest Tommywood column, Tom Teicholz reflects on the closing of Dutton's.

Dutton's was old school: I had a house account there that allowed me to sign for books for which I was billed monthly; my 10-year-old daughter had signing privileges on my account. I had imagined the day would come when she would have her own account, but that is not to be. (This reminds of the time my father was approached about buying a "lifetime membership to a health club," and he replied, "My lifetime, or your company's?" He outlived that business by several decades.) So it goes.

* Robert Birnbaum and Chip Kidd pull up a chair for a long chat.

* And, finally, for those of you unsure which political bumper sticker to affix to your vehicle this year ...

THE GROVES OF ACADEME

David Leavitt partakes in a lengthy, candid interview about the "dire state of fiction" at Court the Jesters.

In all honesty, even though I teach in an MFA program, I have mixed feeling about the MFA industry (and it is becoming something of an industry). Here at UF, for instance, the quantity of applications that we receive increases substantially each year. This year we only accepted 6% of our applicants in fiction. More and more people seem to be writing.

Yet we're told that fiction is on the skids, is tanking, that no one buys novels or story collections any more. There's a paradox here, and a problem that reveals itself when you actually read these stories by people who don't bother to read fiction themselves. At the very least the MFA programs preserve the idea that writing is a craft and that established writers should train younger writers as established musicians train younger musicians and that writers should read great literature in order to learn from it.

If a lot of writers (like me) have ended up in academia, it's not because we're necessarily drawn characterologically to the groves of academe; it's because academia offers writers a degree of stability that's impossible to find elsewhere -- a steady salary, a pension plan, health insurance -- while leaving us time to write. Especially as you get older, these things become more important. On the other hand, writers who teach in MFA programs often find themselves caught up -- unwittingly, it seems -- in academic politics and administration, and these demanding facets of the job can take up so much time that the writers have very little time left to write.

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

* James Wood's How Fiction Works has reached Australia, and now those reviews are starting to come in.

* Birds of Paradise is a novel written in collaboration by readers of the Los Angeles Times.  It looks, well, you be the judge:

Carmen Madonna Louise Ventura shimmied down the old, iron drainpipe that ran from the roof of her apartment building to the alley in the back, her strong legs gripping the slightly rusted metal. It wasn't her usual kind of pole, and under normal circumstances, she might have smiled at the irony. She was, after all, a pole dancer.

* National Poetry Month is upon us, and FSG's poetry blog is going all out.

* Where, oh where, have the literary salons gone?

* Blogging the Classics - a recap of the Oxford Literary Festival panel which included TEV favorite Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook.com.

* The NYRoB disses Steinbeck, and the hometown decides to fight back.

Upon reading such an efficient put-down, we suddenly knew what it must be like to be a Saroyan enthusiast in Fresno. For as long as it took us to finish the piece, we found ourselves questioning our taste not only in literature but in music (hide the Cachagua Playboys CD), food (deny attendance at Pebble Beach Food & Wine) and movies (Clint Who?).

* Nice to see libraries get some author love.  Unbridled Books' Andrea Portes is touring California libraries.

* Andrew Furman pens a lengthy essay on "The Russification of Jewish-American Fiction" for Zeek.

As the literary world was busy showering Shteyngart’s debut with accolades, other young Russian immigrant writers such as Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis were putting the final touches on their first fiction manuscripts, There are Jews in My House (2003) and Natasha (2004), respectively. Through these story collections, Vapnyar and Bezmozgis evoke the jagged contours of Jewish life in the Soviet Union and the tumultuous transition westward through a more restrained, understated English prose, through nearly Carveresque artistic temperaments. Shteyngart and Vapnyar have since contributed follow-ups to their first efforts–the uproarious Absurdistan (2006) and the carefully observed Memoirs of a Muse (2006)–and books by new Russian Jewish fiction writers continue to emerge, most notably Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis (2007), set in various Russian and American locales, sprawling and picaresque in its reach, and Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America (2007), set amid the Russian Jewish enclave of Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.

* The man who started the Bookers suggests that not all winners have been especially deserving.

* Mary Dixie Carter considers Marguerite Duras's Wartime Writings in the Chronicle.

* Jeanette Winterson adds her name to the list of genre-crossing writers with her latest, The Stone Gods.

* A witty take on the Paris Review Interviews.

* Tom Teicholz blogs about Richard Price's recent ALOUD appearance, and realizes: "Price is the Anti-Roth."

* Yes, of course we noticed this recent Banville interview in the Village Voice.  We're just late in getting it to you.

* Peter Carey vents about dumb shit reviewers who are spoiling his story.

* And, finally, the live interview we gave at Duttons on Saturday is now available as a podcast.

THWAITE SPEAKS

It was a real treat for us to finally get to hear Mark Thwaite, one of the UK's best and brightest book bloggers, as he makes the case (and for some, apparently, the case still needs to be made) for reading literary blogs.  Well done, Mark.

MONDAY VIDEO ACTION

First up, there's a new episode of Titlepage online - this installment focuses on non-fiction writers.

Elsewhere, TEV reader Robert Nedelkoff writes in to alert us to this two-part interview in which Nabokov discusses Lolita with Lionel Trilling.  Robert notes "The moderator is the late Pierre Berton, author of many notable works on Canadian history. It was either Nabokov's first TV appearance or close to it. According to Brian Boyd's biography, unlike every subsequent TV appearance VN did where he approved (and usually rewrote) the questions beforehand and memorized written answers, it was completely unscripted. For quite a while there's been a TV interview with VN on Youtube - his last, on "Apostrophes," conducted in French - but this is the only online footage I know of involving him speaking in English."

POETS & WRTERS MAKEOVER

You'll want to check out the revamped P&W website.